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China Reacts: Can Max Baucus Handle Beijing’s Pollution?

Chinese social media users wonder whether the White House’s new choice for ambassador to China will survive in Beijing. Not politically, but physically.

Max Baucus (D-Mont.), shown at a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in October.

Associated Press

U.S. President Barack Obama plans to nominate Sen. Max Baucus to replace outgoing envoy Gary Locke, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The six-term Democrat, who has said he doesn’t plan to run for re-election, just turned 72.

If confirmed, Mr. Baucus would be the oldest person to take up the post since the U.S. and China formally re-established diplomatic relations in 1979.

The Helena native has a wealth of experience in dealing with trade issues—a key issue for Beijing and Washington—but China’s Internet users appeared more concerned with the whether someone with so many years under his belt would be able to handle the rigors of life in the Chinese capital.

“A venerable 72 and he wants to come to the Celestial Kingdom to breathe the poisoned cloud,” wrote one user of the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service. Another user was more direct: “So old! Don’t die in the Beijing smog!”

Still another user suggested Mr. Baucus should be known in Chinese as Ambassador Bao Kesi (包咳死). The last two characters, when combined, mean “cough to death.”

Older American emissaries have served in Beijing and lived to tell about it. David Bruce was 75 when he set up the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing in 1973 — though China Real Time assumes the air was at least slightly cleaner then.

Reaction to news of Mr. Baucus’s impending nomination was far more muted than it was when the White House tapped Mr. Locke in 2011. Mr. Locke, whose grandfather emigrated to the U.S. from southern China in the 1890s, was the first Chinese-American to be named to the post. He quickly won over the Chinese Internet, despite state media efforts to brand him an agent of “neo-colonialism,” largely by conducting himself with a humility perceived to be lacking in China’s own officials.

Pollution also figured into the online speculation when Mr. Locke announced his intention to step down last month, though he has denied that the city’s chewable air had anything to do with his decision to return to the U.S.

Unlike the previous two U.S. envoys, Mr. Baucus has little personal connection to the world’s second-largest economy. (Jon Huntsman, Mr. Locke’s predecessor, speaks Mandarin and has an adopted daughter from China.) Some Internet users saw that as a positive, arguing that the Montanan would be a less confusing representative than Mr. Locke, who was accused by a few nationalists of betraying his motherland.